


sleeping with roses

by powerandpathos



Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: Alcohol, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, M/M, One Night Stands, Rebound Sex, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 06:31:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15746196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: ‘A shame,’ She Li says. He draws an invisible line in the table surface with his fingernail. ‘We both want what we can’t have.’





	sleeping with roses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [traceytries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traceytries/gifts).



> This fic was requested by Tracey! ([Tumblr](http://teanshan.tumblr.com) | [AO3)](http://archiveofourown.org/traceytries) With thanks to [Damien](https://goupthemountaintian.tumblr.com/) for proofreading.
> 
> Want to support me? [Find out on Tumblr.](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)
> 
> The title comes from Chelsea Cutler's song, ['Sleeping with Roses'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCuduoLWEPk).

He likes to think that naivety gets him there. 

He likes to think that it’s the mistake of following a wrong road on his phone’s GPS, that winter chill led him to a shelter of any kind, that it didn’t have to be there, and that it was a mistake. He likes to think that it could have gone differently, because it could’ve. He could’ve left before closing, he could’ve paid his tab and gotten the fuck out of dodge. Could have left for a smoke or three and not looked back. Could’ve stopped going there after the third—fourth?—time. 

He likes to think that it’s naivety that makes him stay, some quiet assurance that things won’t work out exactly as he fucking knows they will. Because it’s all been in the waiting: this, the touches, that narrow waist he follows up a creaking staircase, the mattress his spine gets pressed against.

Regardless, he ends up there, and the truth is he doesn’t leave when She Li shows his hand because there’s nothing in him that makes him want to. Not enough. 

It’s cold in the bar, the door casting in wintry air with every push and pull. The floor is a wet spill of mud and melted snow from the streets and boots traipsing their way back and forth to the bar. There’s no table service in here; it stops people from getting lazy. Stops them getting so drunk they can’t stand up.

She Li catches him in one of the shadowed back booths like a fucking alcoholic hiding his drinking problems. Music from the jukebox hides his footsteps, and Guan Shan glances up when She Li says, ‘Again?’  

Guan Shan sticks his thumb over the lip of his beer bottle and waves his wallet. ‘Got a problem with me being here? I’m fucking  _ paying _ .’

She Li clicks his tongue, and slides into the empty bench across from Guan Shan. ‘And I thought you knew better than this.’

‘Never made it through high school,’ he says, the failure still singing, the disappointment like a cancer that’s been growing in him for a while now. Too busy fucking—too busy fighting. Not even the He’s could pay the school board enough to make up for his absence record. ‘Guess I didn’t learn all that much.’

She Li cups his jaw in his propped-up palm, drums his fingertips against the hollow of his cheekbones. ‘Guess not,’ he says. His grey eyes are like liquid silver in the dimness of the bar; they look like they’re swimming. She Li’s not still like He Tian used to be; he’s not impulsive like Jian Yi, but he keeps himself in motion often enough that it’s hard to look away. 

Another mouthful of beer slides down the back of his throat, and then he’s handing the bottle to She Li, and they’re sharing it like they’re friends. 

They’re not. 

Bribery and pocket knives and blackmail doesn’t get washed away with hops and malt; it doesn’t dissipate with a shared booth in the back of a bar and the foot She Li sometimes presses against Guan Shan’s knee beneath the table. As a kid, Guan Shan couldn’t trust She Li as far as he could throw him. They’re twenty-two now and not much has changed.

Guan Shan’s learnt something in that time, though: you don’t have to be friends with someone to fuck them. 

He’s learnt something else: sometimes that makes it better.

‘Still the radio silence?’

Guan Shan glowers at She Li. He asks this all the time. ‘Four months and counting. Didn’t you mark the day down as a national holiday?’

‘Eh,’ says She Li, spreading his hands. ‘He’s not that important.’

‘You beat the shit out of each other enough times to make it look otherwise.’ 

She Li grins, feral and fierce. ‘We did, didn’t we? Those golden days…’

The fondness is gutting, and Guan Shan hides the nausea with the swipe of a hand across his face. She Li reminisces about He Tian the way Guan Shan thinks about having kissed him. Having seen him in the quiet moments where the world shaped itself around them at 3am, when the darkness was heaviest and the air heavier, and Guan Shan could have pulled anything but truth from He Tian like a loose tooth. She Li thinks about violence the way Guan Shan thinks about love, and the fear comes when Guan Shan realises he’s starting to miss the violence, too. 

_ I’ll let you break my ribs if that brings you back.  _

He’s thought it before, felt himself shake like shitting out razor blades when he tried to brush the realisation away. 

Now, Guan Shan scratches at the bridge of his nose, where a spattering of freckles had bloomed in the long summer months, where He Tian had pressed his lips like bestowing a blessing, sin absolved. Guan Shan had pushed him off—‘I hate them,’ he’d said. ‘They’re so  _ gay. _ ’—and wished the shape of He Tian’s lips had stayed there instead, burned themselves onto him like a scar.

‘He’s not comin’ back,’ he says. ‘We’re done.’

‘He left before,’ says She Li. ‘Jian Yi was gone for  _ years _ .’ A sigh, a wettening of lips. ‘What a waste.’

‘This is different,’ Guan Shan tells him. He doesn’t owe She Li the explanation, but he’s running out of ways to talk about He Tian, which, lately, is the best he’s going to get. ‘We argued.’

She Li leans back. ‘That’s a shame,’ he says. It’s not a limp apology, but it’s nothing better either, vacant as a cadaver. He looks at his nails. ‘What about?’

_ I’ll do better. I’ll make me better. For both of us.  _

‘Doesn’t fuckin’ matter now, does it?’ Guan Shan says gruffly, folding his arms, head against the back of the booth. ‘I just know. He’s not comin’ back.’

‘So you’ll just drown your sorrows in my bar once a month?’

‘I’m not a pisshead.’

‘I didn’t say  _ that _ , Guan Shan.’ She Li angles his head. ‘That would be once a  _ night.  _ But a thousand bars in this city, and you choose mine? Should I be taking something from that?’

‘My place is around the block. It’s convenient.’

‘It’s expensive.’

‘I can afford it.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘I don’t know where else to go.’

They share an even look while the honesty settles sterile and neatly around them, filling cracks and crevices in the fissured conversation.  _ I hate you like I used to hate him and that’s the closest I’ll get anymore.  _

Guan Shan’s fingers bite into his palms and he knows he’ll draw blood; his nails have gotten too long, half-bitten and sharp at the edges. There’s three-day old peach scruff on his neck and he hasn’t slept more than four hours a night since his bed was left one-sidedly empty. None of it felt like a break-up. He hadn’t had one of those before, but it didn’t feel like that. 

This feels like something’s been stealing his bones in the night when it thinks he has his eyes shut; this feels like someone sewing up his arteries until his breathing doesn’t come easy anymore. This feels like the foundations on which he’s been building himself for seven years are falling out in a landslide and he’s the mess of rubble and no insurance. He can’t make himself out of ruined mortar and smashed glass and shit from burst pipes after a disaster. Can’t do it again. 

Music hums over the jukebox:  _'Cause you got the worst of me. But you got to leave and I have to be me._  


Guan Shan zones it out.

‘A shame,’ She Li says. He draws an invisible line in the table surface with his fingernail. ‘We both want what we can’t have.’ The wistful breathiness in his tone is conniving.

‘Jian Yi can’t fucking stand you. That guy’s probably been in love with Zhan Zhengxi since he could talk.’ Guan Shan curls his lip. ‘You haven’t got a  _ chance _ .’

She Li snorted. ‘I don’t want a  _ relationship _ with him. I just want to know what he sounds like when he comes.’

He Tian, once, had said the same about Guan Shan. 

Guan Shan’s mouth twists. ‘You’re a fucking creep.’

‘I say what I’m thinking. A bit like you.’

‘Are you shitting me?’ Guan Shan mutters. ‘You’re a snake. You say what you’re thinking  _ selectively. _ ’

She Li smiles. ‘Who doesn’t like a little censorship?’

‘Is that what you want?’ Guan Shan’s beer is empty; he tastes the word instead. ‘Censorship?’

She Li says, ‘Do you?’

 

* * *

 

 

She Li lives above the bar. Guan Shan hadn’t realised this.

He hadn’t realised, either, that She Li and his family own half the buildings on the terraced street—jewellers and cafés and private apartments—and that She Li owns the top floor on every one, a penthouse that stretches half a mile, furnished in industrial greys and leaving the ceiling pipework bare. 

It’s a burrow, an interconnected tunnel of expensive taste and sharp edges. It inspires about as much warmth as He Tian’s apartment had, but He Tian had known where to stop. Hadn’t objected to the newly potted plants in the bathroom and the second drawer filled with Guan Shan’s clothes in the bedroom or the ceramic key bowl Guan Shan’s mother had given to He Tian as a birthday present on the kitchen counter, filled with  _ fen  _ coins and disposable cigarette lighters and grocery store receipts and half-empty chewing gum packets.

‘Ribbed, flavoured, or bare?’

Guan Shan stops in the doorway to the bedroom, where a bed lies in the middle like a modern art installation, no headboard. She Li holds up packets like a hand of cards from the dresser.

‘Are you clean?’ She Li asks. 

Guan Shan nods, feels a pit in his stomach start to burn like a bonfire as She Li tucks the packets away again and starts to work at the buckle of his belt. 

‘I’m not doing the boy who cried wolf bullshit again,’ She Li tells him flatly, tugging leather through his waistband. ‘You’re in this, or you’re not.’

‘Yeah,’ says Guan Shan. He wills himself to move. ‘I’m in this.’

‘Do you want this?’

Guan Shan’s hands go to the button of his own jeans. ‘Do  _ you _ ?’

It’s enough to make She Li pause, but otherwise the question garners little reaction. A ring of knives is holstered to his thigh, and he sets it down on the dresser. It’s enough for Guan Shan’s throat to hiccup on a swallow so hard it hurts.

She Li says, ‘You’ve been dry for four months.’  _ Six.  _ ‘I don’t do this often. I’m interested.’

Guan Shan’s down to his underwear. There’s something about taking off his own clothes that makes this clinical. ‘I’m not a science experiment.’

She Li stands naked with his clothes folded over the dresser, as attractive as a knife is sharp. He doesn’t wear underwear, and Guan Shan can’t see a single hair but the smallest dusting of dark, wiry strands around his thighs. Thin scars nick at his flesh, slice his right nipple in two, lay messily across his abdomen—but they don’t interest Guan Shan; he hasn’t seen a guy shirtless whose body is a clean slate in a while. There’s a black tattoo like a metal band around his left bicep, a complicated pattern over his right pectoral, and a grey snake wraps its way up She Li’s ankle, the flicking tongue stopping curiously in the dip of his groin. He isn’t hard. 

‘Do you cry when you come? Do you bite your tongue? Do you use your nails? Are you passive? Do you like tongue?’

‘I don’t like talking,’ Guan Shan mutters, and he steps out of his briefs with a hurried movement. He’s almost ashamed by the stiffening between his thighs; the thought of someone’s fingers finally touching him  _ right there  _ and curling inwards makes his pulse throb in his throat. 

‘Fine,’ She Li says. ‘What way do you want this to go?’

_ No,  _ Guan Shan thinks.  _ Too many fucking questions.  _

He Tian had been like a whirlwind: came in like a storm and took what he wanted and left Guan Shan wrecked. Not quick, but destructive. Guan Shan had been so fucking willing to let him take it in a way that was  _ embarrassing.  _

Guan Shan rubs his eyes with the heel of his palms. He feels ridiculous. ‘Can you just fuck me?’ he says. ‘Just—get me on my knees and fuck me. Do what you want.’

She Li shrugs. ‘Whatever.’ 

He moves quickly, and Guan Shan doesn’t have much time to take a breath before She Li’s tugging him to the bed, pushing him down with the heavy, exact smack of a palm between his shoulder blades that leaves him unbalanced and falling.

‘Fucking— _ Wait _ ,’ Guan Shan protests, pushing himself up on his arms. ‘Aren’t you gonna—’

A bare hand, warm, settles on his hip. ‘I thought you didn’t like talking, darling?’

Guan Shan looks down at the sheets, cotton the colour of rain. He takes a breath. ‘Fine.’ 

She Li watches for the shifting of tight muscles down Guan Shan’s back, a sequence of keys twisting in their locks, before he starts to let his hand wander. 

She Li isn’t quick like He Tian; he gives Guan Shan time to think. To breathe. Too much. He takes his time in a way that reeks of intellectual curiosity, careful presses, experimental prods, filing away responses for later, a pursuit of perfection that is making Guan Shan shake.  

_ Get on with it, damnit,  _ he thinks eventually.  _ Fuck me.  _

She Li takes this at his own pace, and the power of it is brutal. They both know he could step away at any second, pull his clothes on, no more or less aroused than he was ten minutes ago. But fuck, Guan Shan would beg for him back. It’s not bad enough yet that he’d go for  _ anyone _ . But maybe leaning into She Li’s grip—the only one Guan Shan knows who likes to get his cock wet in another guy when the mood strikes—is worse.

Half an hour passes, and he’s shaking like a beaten racehorse, and She Li has three lubed-up fingers buried inside him to the knuckle like he’s picking a lock.

‘I’ll take your silence as permission to continue?’

Guan Shan, chewing on the swollen mess of his lower lip, nods fast enough for his ears to ring, and he can  _ hear  _ the stretch of She Li’s lips, cotton stitches breaking the scar of a smile.

If he closes his eyes tight enough, universes blooming beneath his eyelids, he might pretend the fingers inside him are He Tian’s, the palm at the base of his spine He Tian’s, the steady breathing above him He—

‘Please,’ he whispers, willfully shattering his own illusion. It isn’t him and it won’t be him and he won’t let He Tian steal an orgasm from him through the pathetic yearning of his own heart. ‘Fuck, She Li—’

The fingers pull away, Guan Shan fists the bedsheets, and She Li is pushing inside with a slide that catches on Guan Shan’s edges and makes his eyes roll back with a shudder. He’s reduced to She Li’s cock bottoming out inside of him, long, not too thin, hitting what feels like the back of him. 

He wants to cry.

It isn’t the same.

Memory fractures: He Tian with his hand on the door, shadowed, murmuring, ‘I don’t know what else to do anymore.’

And Guan Shan, pleading, ‘Just don’t fucking go.’

Tears leak from the corners of his eyes when She Li gets a hand between his thighs, and he can’t say if it’s pleasure, long overdue, nights spent untouched and un-longed-for and unloved—or the painful realisation that is divorcing a part of his brain like an axe to the head with each strip of She Li’s fist. 

Later, he might realise this is proof. This is the evidence he’d needed: it won’t be the same. It’ll be someone else, somewhere else. It’ll be  _ different.  _ Will they make him feel the same?

The mattress dips, and Guan Shan is pushed forward by the cock in his ass, crying out hoarsely as She Li gets his knees on the bed and rides Guan Shan with ruthless efficiency, skin smacking on skin, the both of them gleaming in sweat. 

They’re about the same height, same strength, but She Li jostles him back and forth like a rag doll and Guan Shan takes the choked pleasure numbingly, nails biting into his hips, fingertips bruising into his shoulders. 

She Li knows where—how—to make it good. He plays Guan Shan’s body like a game of mahjong and learns fast, scary-fast, methodical in the way he offers Guan Shan an orgasm like a token gift he can take away just as quickly. It borders on manipulation, a shark-grin taunt that throws Guan Shan, bloody, into the deep end.

_ I’m going to come,  _ he realises. There’s a pool of drool seeping into the pillow, shoulders collapsed forward into the mattress, and every muscle has gone taut as a string, ripe for the plucking. He thinks about He Tian holding him against the glass window of his apartment, arms outstretched, fingers locked in his, spread like he was tied to a pinwheel and beckoning a wayward arrow to strike the bullseye. 

It had been rough, that night, his jaw knocking against the glass, his lip bitten to bloody shreds, He Tian’s mouth making a violet mess of his neck. Guan Shan had counted the scars the next morning, wondered if they’d stay. 

‘He’s not  _ here _ , Mo Guan Shan,’ She Li mutters, fingers digging into the crook of Guan Shan’s neck, and Guan Shan is cogniscient enough to recognise the echo of his own forlorn cries that shape into a name he wants to forget. ‘He’s  _ gone _ .’

And that’s enough—the nudge over the cliff edge, the gentle shove over the railing of a bridge, and water crashes around him so fast and hard that it  _ hurts _ , coldness freezing his lungs, liquid gushing down his throat like a fist to his solar plexus that forces him to swallow. 

She Li breathes out heavily, hips hiccuping in their rhythm while Guan Shan locks down like an iron cage, and wetness spills between Guan Shan’s thighs like an afterthought. The shape of his hands blurs in front of him; his heart is jackknifing in his chest with a serrated edge. 

‘Fucking hell,’ Guan Shan whispers hoarsely, throat clicking, and She Li matches the words by rocking, carefully, back and forth. 

Guan Shan can’t stop shaking. The build has been chased away, and the tightness in his muscles aches sorely. His hamstrings are locked-up, knees protesting to the jostling pressure. Moving hurts, and he swears when She Li finally slides out from behind him, the space left swollen and sloppy. 

‘Not bad, for someone so passive.’

Guan Shan falls forward on the bed sheets, presses his cheek in the dampness of his own sweat, lets cum seep out and stain the cotton. He hears She Li’s footsteps as the man moves around him to open windows, letting the rancid smell of sex leak away, and cool air tugs goosebumps to the surface of Guan Shan’s skin.

‘You like knives and ropes and pain,’ he murmurs. ‘I wasn’t gonna be fucking  _ interesting _ .’

‘Who told you that?’

‘You’re walking proof.’ 

She Li hums. ‘I don’t mix pleasure and pain.’

‘You think they’re not the same thing?’

‘Poor boy. Is that what he told you?’

Guan Shan twitches against the bedsheets; his skull is tingling where She Li had fisted a chunk of hair. He Tian would have carted the both of them off into the shower by now, their skin steam-hot and iced water sweating condensation on the bedside. 

‘I don’t do sleepovers,’ says She Li, tapping Guan Shan on his heel. ‘Not even for the broken ones.’ 

_ I don’t want a  _ relationship _ with him. I just want to know what he sounds like when he comes. _

Guan Shan bites on his cheek. ‘Broken?’ he says. He wipes a sheen of leaking drool from his chin, and makes the effort of collecting his clothes from the floor. It feels strange to be putting them back on again, sullied and sated, body newly aching. ‘Who told you that?’

She Li smiles in the doorway. ‘You’re walking proof.’

 

* * *

 

She Li pays for a Didi for him to get home and tells him the bar tab’s been handled. Guan Shan keys in the code to his apartment complex and wonders if that means he whored himself for three beers.  

He hadn’t—She Li wouldn’t want the mess of that—but any interaction with She Li is marked with a power struggle. He Tian was like that, unused to yielding—unused to finding someone as stubborn as an uprooting tree in a hurricane. 

What is it, Guan Shan wonders, that throws him into the oncoming traffic of entitled boys with a thirst for violence?

He doesn’t answer that question.  _ I let She Li between my legs,  _ he thinks instead, face glowing briefly from the fluorescent light of his fridge door. He swipes a beer from the empty shelves, and the generator hums noisily once it’s shut. Guan Shan breaks the cap on the edge of the counter where the plaster is starting to peel away. 

The beer pours down his throat in four heavy gulps. 

His tongue is bitter, breath sour. He scowls at the pile of dishes in the sink while he drifts into the bedroom, at the stacks of mail crowding the table for two he doesn’t remember ever sitting at. He wants another beer, and a cigarette, and tries to tell himself the night is still young.

It takes a while. The realisation. Anger proportioned and reason justified.

It’s when he trips on the rising carpet for the hundredth time, and his bed springs smack hard into his spine when he falls onto it. It’s when his window only cracks open the width of a fingertip to let the cigarette smoke out, when the showerhead sputters out water and pipes groan a chainsmoker’s kind of symphony, and when he has to take his own clothes off and relearn the lines of his body after roaming his apartment like a ghost.

He Tian knew them better than he did. He Tian knew how to care for them better than he did. 

Guan Shan brings his knees up to his chest in the tub; his head feels like grey matter, his thoughts blank and one-way and gagging for closure. It wasn’t the sex. It wasn’t the fact that someone else had their hands on his balls or made his toes curl while he came. It wasn’t that it was She Li. 

It was that it wasn’t him. 

When his phone rings, sitting on the bath mat, Guan Shan reaches for it blindly. The screen reads UNKNOWN in white letters, and only a handful of people have his number. He wipes his face in the towel on the back of the door, digs out water from his ear.

‘What?’ he snaps, waiting for the automated response, or the awkward marketing call.

‘It’s me,’ is what comes instead. ‘Let’s talk.’

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or [see ways of supporting me as a writer via my Tumblr!](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)


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